Monday, November 4, 2013

Oh come now. Regardless of whether it actually was or wasn't, who with a straight face can say that the Forcible Disarmament Now! crowd is in any way above it?

Via Workman, I just saw this YouTube, which is only really convincing in its perfectly understandable angst. Angst about the obvious sense that something stinks. And something always stinks about these things, doesn't it? Always. And I'm not talking about the pluperfectly predictable stink of a mass shooting occurring in a "gun-free zone", either.

It is truly amazing, isn't it, that all these meme-perfect events only happen when frothing legislators have bills in hand, fresh oil in the propaganda machine, and a sense of either hunger or momentum among their legions of sycophants? They don't happen in the troughs, do they? It may have occurred to you before that things like the Brady Bill and the AWB, for all their sound and thunder (you remember that, right?), would not even have prevented the events that inspired them--instead the events that did happen were molded by propaganda to fit the desired political meme, and with enough repetition the lie became...what's that term again?...oh yeah, "settled science". Even today, the victim disarmers regularly admit that their interest is in the meme above all else; how many times have you heard some nitwit (with power over people's lives) say "well, sure, what we're proposing may not have prevented what just happened, but fersure we know it's a Good First Step(TM)"? Yeah, I've lost track too.

So now we have this LAX shooting episode, which from the reports I've seen seems just about as meme-perfect as one could imagine today. (Try not to imagine tomorrow--it's depressing.) EBR? Check. Note indicating his intentions? Check. "Patriot" affiliation? Check. Antigovernment sentiment? Check. Wanting to show "how easy it is to get a gun into the airport"? Check. A scenario that the whole airport just trained for a few weeks earlier? Check. Made-to-order "heroism" from a detested agency struggling for legitimacy? Check. Really, one could go on. It rather reminds me of a great analogy Grigg made while illustrating the FBI's manufactury of "terrorism" from which they may then be widely seen saving us all.

What political profit would result from allowing local authorities to
prosecute Williams on a charge involving an actual property crime? On
the other hand, arresting him as part of a black Muslim terrorist cell
-- now, there's a bust with a high Q rating. Or, to recur to the
Scrabble analogy, that's like playing the "z" tile on the triple word
score square at the intersection of two fifteen-letter words.

There's also all the things that did not happen here, that make no sense. As just one for instance: I'm sorry, this shooter survived after opening fire at LAX and reportedly capping a TSA badge? This isn't just an Only Ones zone, this is LA. The place where, as Joel so memorably put it:

UPDATE: Mildly concerned police officers basically shooting everybody they see, on theory that it might turn out to be Dorner.

Does anyone doubt that this Ciancia fellow is going to sing the DiFi meme-song, on time, on cue and with perfect pitch?

Other stuff will be found to stink too--count on that. Apparently the folks who made the above YouTube also feel that the blueshirt in the wheelchair was a dummy, and that the LAX police chief botched lines that were handed to him. Yeah, well, maybe. (Their strongest case, really, is nothing more than the idea that "officials vehemently deny...", which always lends a certain legitimacy in any political system.) One might also reasonably wonder things like why the shooter returned to where he began, and why he bothered to carry boxed ammunition if he was expecting a quick, suicidal engagement. There's the remarkably meme-convenient "just recently moved from Jersey", and so on. Plenty of things for people to bicker about while ignoring the core lesson that "gun-free zones" are still a monumentally stupid idea.

Well--for everyone except those running the protection racket, of course.

And to wrap up this "how amazing is all this?" fantasia, how about the idea that anyone who even notices these anomalies, discrepancies, patterns, histories, motivations, incentives--is inherently suspect, almost certainly a terrorist, and probably a witch. You know, "agin' us" because they're not "with us".

So, here we go again. Some creep visibly demonstrates, again, that forcible disarmament does nothing but create an obvious killing field...the slime mold from the statehouse oozes on by to wag its blobulous finger at the little people for not being sufficiently cowed by it all to hand over the rubberstamp...and the war on the people who didn't do it is fired up once again.

"They hate us because we're free." Hell, after all this time and all those perfectly deserved jokes, it seems that indeed "they" really do.